Writing a rubric that can accurately evaluate student work can be tricky. Rather than a single right or wrong answer, rubrics leave room for interpretation and thus subjectivity. Todd Stanley’s recent release, Using Rubrics for Performance-Based Assessment: A Practical Guide to Evaluating Student Work, will show classroom teachers not only how to create their own objective rubrics, which can be used to evaluate performance assessments, but also how to develop rubrics that measure hard-to-assess skills, such as leadership and grit, and how to empower their own students to create rubrics that are tailored to their work. Learn more about the book and how it can be used to assess student performance in this Q&A with the author:

Q: What’s the most important factor to take into consideration when developing a rubric? Why?

A: I would say the most important factor is actually twofold. First, make sure the rubric is measuring what you intend it to measure. Sometimes teachers attempt to evaluate things that have little to do with the overall mastery of the skill they want students to learn, or too much value is placed on something that is not as important. Striking this balance can be tough, but by breaking the skill down into a couple of categories, you can ensure you have the complete picture of student mastery of that skill.

The second thing would be user-friendliness. This is especially true if you are assessing performance where you have to have quick access to the rubric in order to properly evaluate students. It also applies if you have others using the rubric to help evaluate students. Is the rubric easy for them to understand and use? If not, you need to revise the rubric so that it makes sense to anyone, not just to you. This also helps when students are trying to use the graded rubric to figure out what they can improve upon.

Q: How can rubrics be used to measure hard-to-assess softer skills, such as leadership and grit?

A: Rubrics capture performance. Think of a rubric like a snapshot of student progress. If you write a descriptive and clear picture of what these skills look like, actually showing and not telling, then when students are able to demonstrate these skills, you can assess them properly. It can be very difficult to assess some of these skills by using a test…

We use a lot of data in education. Data to see how students are growing. Data to see where gaps are that need to be filled. Data to predict how a student might do next year. I believe in this data wholeheartedly, but I also see the value in an old school conversation. If you really want to find out the impact you are having on students, I suggest talking with them many years after they have left your classroom to see what stuck after you taught them. This was the situation I found myself in when a student I had in class 22 years ago and decided to get together for lunch.

I had Joey for two years, for 7th and 8th grade, as well as coaching him on the tennis team. While in school, Joey had been one of those students who you could tell was bright, but didn’t always give his best effort when it came to academics. He was a B student but easily could have gotten all As if he had applied himself just a little more. Some would call him lazy, others might term it disinterested, yet others might say bored. Regardless, I enjoyed having conversations with Joey and the challenge he presented. He spoke a lot in my class and what he shared was usually thought-provoking.

I noticed something Joey did care about; playing cards. He seemed quite skilled at all sorts of card games, even getting pretty good at stacking the deck. While playing euchre on the tennis bus once, he dealt me a perfect loner hand. I gave the cards back to Joey and asked him to deal normally. He agreed but with a smirk on his face.

Once Joey had moved on to the high school, he would tell me how he spent the weekend at the local American Legion because it was a place he could play cards with adults legally and take their money. He continued to be an average student, and I remember one of his teachers telling me he was furious with Joey. “How dare he skip my class to play cards,” this teacher said incredulously.

The ironic thing was that as I was sitting here in the present day, talking to Joey, he was telling me about his profession, that of a professional poker player. Joey and I had reconnected because one evening, I was watching a World Poker Tour tournament on television, where many of the world’s best poker players gather to play. They were announcing the final table of six players and the announcer said,

“Local poker pro Joey Couden is our fourth player.”

I did a double-take. Is that…my Joey? Sure enough, the student who had once graced my classroom came walking out and took his seat at the poker table. What was interesting to me was that my memories of Joey had always been as a fun-loving, jovial guy who would love to carry on a conversation. At the poker table, though, he was all business. He barely said a word, with a pensive look nearly the entire time. It was obvious to me, he was at work, and he took his work seriously.

I looked him up on the internet and found out he had won the Florida State Poker Championship in 2015 and a World Series of Poker event in 2018, the Olympics of the poker world, beating players that were in the Poker Hall of Fame. Not only that, he had $2.3 million in live earnings. Of course, this was not counting the money he had won (or lost) in cash games or private games. He was not only making a living at doing this thing he had been training since high school to do; he was doing quite well for himself.

I reached out to him on Twitter and eventually, we ended up at the aforementioned lunch. It was nice to catch up with Joey. I was surprised at how much he remembered from my class and we reminisced and gave updates on people we had both known.

My lunch with Joey got me thinking. How many students had passed through the doorway to my classroom who had a talent that school did not necessarily support…

Many of you in the state of Ohio sat through the presentation by the Ohio Department of Education who showed us lots of data on how gifted programming is not equitable. We over-identify white and Asian students, and under-identify Black and Latinx students. Even if you do not have large populations of these students in your district, at the very least, the gifted population should be a reflection of your normal school population. In other words, if your student population is 12% minority, your gifted programming should be comprised of 12% minority students. This is often times not the case though which leads to inequity in gifted education.

This is not an Ohio problem, it is a national one. I think we all agree that it is not equitable, but what can we do about it? What can we do when many of the constraints preventing a student from being properly identified are out of our control such as economic disadvantages, parents who may not highly value an education or know how to encourage it, or not a lot of exposure to the language?

As a state, we already do a lot of the things that books on the subject matter are suggesting to level the playing field such as whole grade screening (there are still many states that test on referral only) and the accountability of our gifted report card that forces districts to look at the subgroups of minority and economically disadvantaged in order to score well on the gifted input. And yet the data shows that while there might be slight improvements, we are not moving the proverbial needle. On the flipside, as a state, we cannot do some things others are doing such as local norms where you take the top 5% of a building or district to determine identification in that district, not using a nationally normed percentage.

I know in my district I have tried some things such as whole grade screening multiple times in a grade band in order to cast a larger net, offering the Naglieri so that the vocabulary or lack thereof it does not trip a student up from showing his true abilities, and having conversations with teachers on what to look for from a gifted student. There are still many teachers who think gifted students are the ones that turn in their work on time, are hard workers, care about grades, and volunteer in class to answer questions. In other words, they are the compliant ones. We all know that there are many gifted students who are not the most compliant students and so dispelling this myth is important (especially when I am working to identify creative thinkers). And while I have seen the number of minority students who are in programming go up over the years, it is still not commensurate with the typical school population.

The problem is not the gifted programming though. It is the door we use that students must get the pass key for in order to get access to that programming. We use nationally vetted assessments where students must score in the top 5% of the normed number established by the testing company. In my district, we use these numbers not only to identify gifted students, but to determine their placement in our slate of gifted programming that we have available. The only way the student is getting service is if he meets the requirements. This is where the Catch 22 comes into play. If the student cannot get into the top 5%, they are not considered for service. But we have already established that these nationally normed tests have a bias to them that over-identify one group and under-identify the other. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and yet expecting a different result. If we keep testing students and offering services the way we are, nothing is going to change.

That is why we need to reconsider the way we do identification. After all, we are in the game of working with students to think outside of the box. Why should we not expect this of ourselves? We need another layer to the identification of gifted students. We need to identify and develop talent we have at our schools so that those who just need that extra encouragement, those who will respond to the challenge, those who are being left out but if they were exposed to such programming, would thrive and grow, get such an opportunity.

Just as there are RTI students on the cusp of qualifying for special educational services that we focus on and work hard to prevent this from happening, there are students just near the cut-off mark for gifted that we could provide with resources and teaching strategies designed to tap into this potential they have shown. We do the exact opposite of RTI and work with them to get them in.

What does this look like? I know this situation would not work for everyone but my district is one with seven elementary schools, where there are have and have-not buildings. What I would like to do in my district is to create identification at our elementary buildings with the lowest numbers of gifted students, which surprise surprise, happens to be our title I schools, where we look at students who nearly qualified and put them in with a GIS. This GIS then uses strategies and rigor that she would use with her gifted identified students, and we see how these students respond to the challenge. My suspicions are that many of these students will rise up to this specialized instruction and the next time they are tested, will get the necessary score for identification and thus qualify for programming that is available at our middle and junior high schools.

This is a win win for us because the GIS at those have-not buildings only has 2 to 3 students, while the GIS at our more affluent buildings have upwards of 15 students per class. If we identify an additional 10 students who are near the cut off but not quite there and put them in these classrooms, the teacher is working with more students, and more students are receiving challenge.

However you decide to do it, consider the prospect of talent development. How do we identify those students that with just a little push, would excel? We know that talent is distributed evenly but resources are not. What if we just distribute these resources a little more evenly. Wouldn’t this then lead to more equity in gifted education?

There are five P’s of communication that you would want to focus on while communicating with the parents of gifted students:

· Person

· Potential

· Present

· Programming

· Psychology

First and foremost, you should treat their child as a person, not as a number or as a mythical creature due to her gifted ability. This is a child. Just because she is gifted does not make her more than a child. She should not be put on any pedestal nor should she be held to a higher expectation. The expectation might be different but not higher. When talking with the parents you should address the needs of the child, not the giftedness. This can be difficult for both parties. Sometimes the parent wants to focus on the gifted aspect while neglecting the child part of the equation. A teacher too can focus on the gifts of the child rather than the child herself. Every child has needs in school, both academically and social/emotional. Even though they talk like an adult and act like an adult sometimes, lest not forget that a kid needs to be a kid.

Along with this treating a gifted child as a person because of their ability, you also need to look at the potential of that individual child as related to his giftedness. This does not mean holding the child to high expectations, it means holding the child to expectations he is capable of. These should be different for every gifted child you have in your classroom rather than a single bar that everyone is expected to jump over. You might have a student who is very adept at science but his language arts skills are not as strong. You would not have the same expectations for that child in both subject areas. You would expect a lot in science but have lower expectations in ELA. Even within a subject area there may be strengths students excel at while there are others that slow them down. An example would be a student who is really skilled at multiplication and can solve complex problems involving this skill. However, fractions trip him up and so the teacher would not expect as strong as work.

You will want to remain in the present when talking to a parent about their gifted child. What I mean by this is often times we compare the past or look ahead at the future without addressing the present needs. This can be especially tempting with a gifted student. When communicating with parents of a gifted child, help them to see the present and to not be so concerned with what has happened in the past nor what might occur in the future. Where their child is right now is most important and figuring out how to best reach his potential.

When talking with a parent, you should be knowledgeable about what your school district has to offer in the way of gifted programming. Different schools across the United States have different ways to provide gifted services to students who qualify. Sometimes this comes in the form of a magnet program where students are brought from all over, putting the children with the highest ability together in one place. There are pull out programs where the child gets pulled for an hour a day or perhaps an entire day during the week in order to have her needs met. There are cluster groups where instead of having an entire class full of gifted students, you group a few of them together and then differentiate their lessons to challenge them more. Some schools offer service in the form of after school programs and others do not provide any formal gifted programming. It is important for you to be familiar with what your school has to offer in the way of programming.

Psychology involves the social/emotional needs of gifted students. Children who are gifted tend to have what Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski called over-excitabilities:

Psychomotor – lots on energy, constantly on the move

Sensual – heightened awareness of the five senses

Intellectual – thinking all the time and want difficult questions answered

Imaginational – intensity of their imagination

Emotional – can seem to be sensitive

While some of these are academic in nature such as intellectual and imaginational, sensual and emotional over-excitabilities fall under the umbrella of social/emotional needs. As a teacher of a gifted child, you should be focusing just as much if not more on the social/emotional needs of the child as compared to his academic needs.

Keeping parents appraised of how their child is doing socially/emotionally does a few things. It shows you care about their child and has gotten to know her well enough to recognize some of these behaviors. It verifies for the parent behaviors they probably see at home. They might even be able to offer some pointers on how best to handle a situation the child has become over-excitable about. Another thing is the focus is just not on grades but social skills that will be invaluable when this child goes to high school, college, and the workforce. If a child can learn to work well with others, this 21st century skill will translate well into further success. Finally, it gives the student a well-rounded education. You are addressing the social well-being of this child as well as the academic. Our job as teachers is not to turn out excellent students, but to turn out excellent human beings.

Keeping in mind that while working with parents of a gifted child that you treat their child like a person, look at her potential, focus on the present, becoming familiar with the programming the district offers, as well as considering the psychology of the child’s social/emotional needs, you will to forge relationships with the parents of these special children.

Unfortunately, it does not guarantee that every relationship you forge with parents is going to be golden. There are those parents who for whatever reason, there is a personality conflict or you get started off on the wrong foot and cannot seem to ever recover. The golden rule in parent communication is always remember to maintain your professionalism, and treat their child like you would want your child to be treated by her teacher. If you adhere to these two edicts, engagement should be much easier to achieve.

Enrichment Activities for Gifted Students outlines a variety of extracurricular academic activities and programming options for gifted student talent development. The book provides everything busy educators need to know about offering, funding, and supporting enrichment activities and programs that develop students’ content knowledge and expertise, build valuable real-world skills, and extend learning beyond the walls of the classroom. Learn more about the book and enrichment options for gifted students in this interview with the author, Todd Stanley.

Q: How is this book organized? What is included in each section/chapter?

A: I tried to make the book as user-friendly as possible and set it up as more of a reference book than one you read from cover to cover. I divided the chapters into subject areas, such as math, language arts, science, and social studies. I also included chapters that were related to skills such as creative thinking and leadership. Within each of those chapters, I have five examples of an academic extracurricular activity (AECA) involving that topic, four of which are nationally known programs, and one that can be a homegrown program that you start at your school to fit a specific need. I broke down each activity further into the following headings:

• What is this activity?

• Who can be involved?

• Where does this activity take place?

• When does this activity occur?

• Why should students participate?

• How do you run this activity?

A person should be able to read the section on that AECA and have a pretty good idea of what it involves and how to run it.

Q: How are enrichment activities and programs beneficial to gifted students?

A: As someone who has been doing these AECAs for more than 20 years, I have seen the long-term benefits of such activities. I see this in former students, one of whom participated in Destination Imagination 23 years ago. When we sat down for coffee just last month, he still remembered the experience and what his team’s challenge was. I have also seen the benefit in my own daughter, who participated in many of these AECAs, such as Model United Nations, Business Professionals of America, and Youth and Government. The experience she gained in public speaking in an authentic setting gave her the confidence to be successful in procuring co-ops in her field of study. It has given her an advantage over other students who did not have these experiences.

Personal anecdotes aside, in the October 2019 issue of Gifted Child Quarterly, there is an article by Jonathan Wai and Jeff Allen. They looked at 21 years of data to determine effective ways to help gifted students develop their talents, especially at the secondary level. They took a look at extracurricular activities and the effect they had on academic growth. The results were a little mixed. Activities such as community service, debate, performing arts, or cultural clubs were found to have positive effects on a student’s academic growth. Nonacademic clubs, such as social clubs, radio/tv, or sports, were shown to have a negative impact on student achievement growth.

Why go big?

Go big or go home is a phrase we frequently use to encourage someone to take a risk. Why is going big so important? Because the “big” is where great things happen. There are many similar sayings out there, such as “no one ever achieved greatness by playing it safe” or “great things never come from comfort zones.” How many times did Steve Jobs go big? Recall his setbacks with Apple Lisa and the NeXT Computer. If he had not failed a few times and learned from his mistakes, we would not be texting on iPhones and listening to Apple Music on iPods today.

Cleveland Browns versus Kansas City Chiefs

The playoff football game that recently occurred between the Cleveland Browns and Kansas City Chiefs is a case in point of the Chiefs’ coach going big. Imagine that the game is once again at the fourth down, and there is one yard to go… If the Chiefs make the first down, the game will be over for the Browns; however, if they cannot get the yard, the Browns will get the ball back on downs and have the opportunity to score the game-winning touchdown. It appears as though Kansas City will try and get the Browns to go offsides, and if it doesn’t work, call a timeout. After all, their star quarterback has been knocked out of the game, and their backup is a thirty-five-year-old journeyman who has not played in years. Much to the shock of the Browns and the people watching, they snap the ball and make a daring pass to a player who gains several yards, sealing the fate of the Cleveland team.

What happened? The coach of the Chiefs, Andy Reid, took a humongous chance. Reid is now hailed as a strategic genius because the Chiefs got the first down and won the game.

The Case of Grady Little

Nevertheless, I wonder how many people have gone big and did not succeed, forced to pay failure’s steep price with the loss of their job, with ridicule, or with a poor grade? If you do not believe me, ask Grady Little. He was the manager of the Boston Red Sox. In a baseball game between Boston and their dreaded rival, the Yankees, Little had a really tough decision to make: leave in his star pitcher Pedro Martinez who had pitched a great game thus far or bring in a reliever. Little went big and left Martinez in the game. The next batter got a double, and eventually, Boston lost the game. Little did not have his contract renewed. He went home. If Martinez had instead struck out the next two batters, Little would have been hailed as a master, and his contract would have been renewed (with a hefty raise)!

Encouraging Risk-Taking

Sadly, the sporting world teaches us that if you go big in an environment where failure is not allowed, you might go home. In other fields such as technology and business, companies like Google reward people for being creative and taking a chance. In fact, it was encouraged with their “20% Project,” where employees were given twenty percent of their workday as free time to develop anything that interested or intrigued them. During that time, they developed products like Gmail, Google Maps, and AdSense. Despite employee productivity, many avenues pursued that led to nothing – ideas that once implemented did not work or ended in failure.

The art and music field, another profession where taking risks is not only allowed but encouraged. Can you imagine if one of Jackson Pollock’s teachers had told him to stop playing with his brush and insisted he paints like everyone else? Consider this sobering thought as well: What if the Beatles had not evolved from a boy band into producing such groundbreaking albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band (which was a huge risk, given its progressive themes)?

Risk-Taking in Education

Where do we place education on this spectrum? Is it a place where risk-taking and, thus, mistakes are encouraged or are students dissuaded from trying things for fear of failure? Unfortunately, education has a long history of being a place where failure is not allowed. We actually fail kids; it is part of the grading hierarchy. However, that does not mean our classrooms cannot be a place where students can go big and not have to worry about failure. You can create an environment where students feel comfortable going big or making the “big oops” because that is where our greatest lessons are learned.

Establishing a Classroom Environment to Go Big

How do you establish this culture of going big in your classroom? After all, it is not something you simply demand. It is something you must deliberately create. Here are five ways you can create an environment where students feel encouraged to go big:

• Give Students Choice: This choice might be in the shape the assessment of learning takes, it may be the product, it may be the method, it could even be the choice to take that risk and go big. Students need to feel as though they have a choice. Without choice, they will feel as though they have no control over whether they can take a risk or not.

When I was a boy, all those many eons ago, one of my favorite pastimes, like most young boys, was building with Legos. The way Legos worked back in the 80s is that you got a set that had all different sorts of shapes and sizes, laid out in a beautiful Crayola cornucopia. At least that was how the set started. After like two times of using it, the pieces, colors, and extra things that had somehow snuck their way into the box, such as coins or paper clips, were all mixed together and you spent a good amount of time rooting through different compartments. But this randomness sort of mirrored your building process. When you decided to build something, say a car, you picked whichever pieces looked the most appropriate or were closest by, and you snapped them together, hoping it would take the shape you had in your mind. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t, but the most important thing, and something I was not even aware of, was the creative thinking process I was going through. If I wanted to build a particular something, I had to figure out for myself how to do this. Sometimes it was a matter of throwing pieces together and morphing it into something you didn’t even expect but were pleased by. It was like I was given a lump of clay and told to make whatever I could think of.

So you could imagine my joy when my two daughters, who did not take a liking to baseball, reading, or exploring creeks, which were activities I spent most of my childhood doing, wanted to play with Legos. I was so excited I took them to the store and let them pick out a set they wanted to build. My first realization that things were much different was the sticker shock. Legos in the 21st century are expensive. A relatively small set can run around $25 and there are larger sets that run into the hundreds of dollars. This aside, the most disappointing thing to me about the 21st century Lego was when I opened the box and poured out its contents, the first thing I spied was an instruction manual about the thickness of a magazine. The Legos themselves were cordoned off into separate bags labeled A, B, C, and so on. The booklet turned out to be the step-by-step instructions for how to put the structure together. You open bag A, put together this piece, then that, then that one, following the illustrations in the booklet. Then you move on to bag B. You do this until all the bags are used and your structure looks just like the one on the box. Legos had gone from being something you use creativity to build with to constructing a puzzle. It was paint-by-numbers Lego building, where following directions and being compliant was much more important than being creative. The offenses became even more egregious when I suggested to my daughter we take the thing apart. These Legos weren’t to be used again, she informed me. Instead, they were designed to be used only once and then put on display like a museum piece. As much as I liked spending time with my daughters and putting this Lego structure together, I couldn’t help but lament how the creativity of Legos was now gone and in its place was this Orwellian model of having to do things a particular way.

In my over twenty years in education, I feel sort of the same thing has happened. Instead of teachers getting to use their creativity to plan lessons that will challenge their students, they are handed canned curriculum or programs that take them step-by-step on how to teach it.

As anyone not living in a cave knows, COVID has shut down business as usual at most schools and students are learning virtually a lot more than they used to. This is working for some students, but not all.

Case in point, my own daughter, who is an 8th grader, with two college-educated parents and one sister in college in the home, is struggling in her studies. She is one of those kids that needs a classroom environment where the teacher is always telling her what to do and when to move onto the next lesson. In a virtual setting, because there is not that presence hanging over her, she decides to do some things, but when she does not understand something or has a technology issue, she sort of ignores the assignment and moves onto something else. As a result, her grades are not where they used to be. And don’t think, as the district gifted coordinator and an educator for over 20 years, that I don’t feel like the worst father in the world. This is like a professional basketball player having a son who is not good at shooting free throws, or a professional writer whose kids don’t like to read (yes, that one hangs over my head as well).

So I have been spending a lot of time lately working with my daughter, going through all of her assignments, checking in through email with her teachers, and trying to get her to a place where she is back on track and able to actually learn something. Some would chalk up my daughter’s problem to a lack of executive functioning skills. She needs to be taught to be more organized. And while this is true to a certain extent, it still doesn’t take away from the fact that if the teacher is not laying down the breadcrumbs in their LMS or classroom, she isn’t going to go where they want her to, no matter how organized she is. This problem is a much larger one.

Through this process, I had something verified for me that I suspected all along; a lot of kids don’t know how to learn on their own. My daughter has been in schools for 10 years, and in that time, did not have a teacher who taught her to learn independently. As a result, she has become a dolphin in captivity. Instead of being able to find food on her own, she waits for the trainer to come to the dock and hand-feed her fish. If that trainer doesn’t show up one day, the dolphin doesn’t know what to do and just goes hungry. Similarly, my daughter does not know how to learn without a teacher being there to give her the information.